12 Tactics to Make More Time EVERY Day with Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
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Time is a limited resource that we all want more of. So today we're going to share the secret to make time in your life. It's not going to be a bunch of productivity hacks to get more done, finish your to-dos faster or outsource your life. Instead, we're going to share a framework and a bunch of tactics designed to help you actually create more time in your day for the things you care about. Whether that's spending time with your family, starting a side business, learning a new language, writing a book,

or anything else that's important to you. If you're new here and want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, go ahead and click that follow button and let's get into it right after this.

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What do you think most people are getting wrong when it comes to how they manage their time? Managing your time is not all about productivity. In fact, we think that's sort of the wrong way to look at it entirely. Instead, managing your time is about figuring out what matters the most to you in your work, in your life, and finding a way to bring your best efforts to bear on those things that matter the most to you.

So to make that happen, we have to forget about a lot of the conventional wisdom about staying on top of things, being as responsive as possible, being the best employee possible in the traditional sense. And we've created a framework for rethinking the way you spend your energy every day and modifying all of these things that sometimes become invisible in the way that we behave, the

sleep, everything and restructuring it around spending your energy on what is most important. It's a four part framework. And it all starts with a very simple idea that we call the highlight. And the rest can be a mess. But if you get the one most important thing, it's the biggest way to transform what you're doing at work and transform your experience in your life in general. I think that seems obvious, right? Oh, just get the one thing done. It's not the first time I've heard that. What did you guys uncover in all the research you've done that kind of

makes you approach it differently. We had a really unique opportunity to do research to back up the things that we've seen firsthand. Our weird research lab is that for the past, I don't know, what is it now? It's well over a decade. John and I have had the opportunity to run design sprints, the process I created at Google. John and I kind of perfected working with you at Google Ventures, Chris. And we get the chance to take a team for a week at a time

and totally control the schedule as they're starting off their most important project. In that sort of lab, we can see what happens when you clear away all of the defaults of the way people normally work, normally behave, normally have conversations, normally manage their email and all that stuff.

You clear all of that away and do it in a different way. What happens? As we did that, these lessons came out that John and I started applying to our own projects and then eventually our own day-to-day lives. I remember a lot of that process doing Design Sprint. So I love that we broke it all down, but

Why is this happening right now? Why are people not able to be productive? The thing that's really new are these sources of effectively unlimited information that we now pay attention to, right? Your email, which is, I guess, not technically infinite, but effectively infinite, and Slack and news and social media. We sort of

fused that phenomenon with some ideas about industrial productivity. And when we put those together, we created this situation where we feel like the best way to be productive is to get really good at responding to those things, to become really effective reaction machines instead of focusing on the things that we actually care about and the things that we actually need to spend time on and want to spend time on. And

And so all of the world that we've constructed around ourselves, the defaults is a word that we use a lot. And, you know, we use it partially because our background is in software product design. And when you install a new piece of software, it has defaults. But we think it's a really important word to understand, just kind of like the

the way things work, the status quo, sort of the normal mode of operation in the world, all these defaults, they don't encourage us to take Jake's advice and focus on one thing each day, but they encourage us instead to react to the next thing and to say yes to every meeting and to pay attention to what's new on our screens. That has just...

made it really hard and it continues to get worse because anybody listening to this or watching this knows that the tools that I just mentioned, it's only getting better and faster and more irresistible. In some ways, these things are very familiar human problems, but in other ways, they continue to get harder to deal with. And Jake, we talk about productivity and I think that so often gets lost in the world of work, right? Like I got to get more emails sent and projects built. When you

When you guys wrote Make Time, was it just about work? No, it's not just about work. I think a lot about the feeling at the end of the day, when you look back on the day and you kind of have a feeling of how the day went. I keep this little journal where I'll write down things that I'm grateful for that happened during the day. What are the things that happened in the day that make you feel good about the day? Some kind of a highlight. And that highlight might come from work, but they also often come from just day-to-day life. The real trigger for me in trying

trying to take some of these ideas that we had been thinking about for work itself and applying them outside of work was, I remember when my kids were little, playing on the floor with them with wooden trains, and my son all of a sudden saying like, hey, dad, what's going on your phone? And he's just like genuinely wondering what interesting, fascinating thing I'm looking at on my phone. I didn't even realize it while we were playing. After all of my efforts to be as sufficient as possible, it was like,

The Lord of the Rings when Bilbo Baggins reaches in his pocket to pull out the ring, like you don't even know you're doing it. The thing I realized at that moment was that this whole, like the reaction machine thing that John talked about, it's ever present in our lives. And if you take this lens of I'm going to focus on the one most important thing, and I'm going to try to eliminate the

those defaults, all those pulls, wherever I possibly can, wherever they don't serve me, wherever I'm serving them rather than them serving me, then the game changes in your larger life too. And in that moment, I like deleted every app on my phone that had infinite content in it. This is like 2012. So I was like deleted like my email off the phone. I deleted all of the games. I deleted Facebook and Instagram and I figured I would turn off the browser.

I was so angry at myself that I would give up this time that I knew was precious with my kids for the unknown pole of the infinite universe.

And I haven't gone back actually. The default settings that the world is asking of us are crazy and they're pulling us away from the people we love the most. And at work, they pull us away from the projects where we can actually do the most good, where we can have the largest effect because nobody has a better insight into what you can do that's going to be of outsized importance and probably than you yourself. Everywhere these forces are kind of working against us.

So everywhere we can benefit from fighting back. Before we just tell everyone to delete everything on their phone, which we might do, but you talked about this infinite stuff, which kind of dovetails to these two important things, busy bandwagon, infinity pools. Let's talk about what those are and how they're probably taking away our time.

Yeah, so the busy bandwagon is where these defaults show up in culture. So the expectation that you say yes to every meeting, that you should constantly monitor your email and respond right away, that being busy is a sign that you are an important and successful person in the world. So that's kind of the culture. The infinity pools, that's our term now.

for the places where defaults show up in our technology and in our media and content. And we came up with this term because when you think about email, you think about social media, even streaming, there's an infinite source of content. There's always water in the pool. You can always jump back in at any time. Those are infinity pools. The bad news is that those are really irresistible. They're like

very effectively designed and engineered and optimized to be irresistible. But the good news is that they're actually pretty easy to put up barriers around. It's pretty easy to change the defaults so that it's maybe not totally impossible to access because I use all those things that I just mentioned. I helped design some of them. I find a lot of value in them, but it's relatively straightforward. If you know a few tricks, we call them tactics, specific ways of

of creating barriers, of changing the defaults, basically to make it just harder to get sucked in, to make these things slightly less irresistible, to add some friction that then kind of frees up your energy so that you don't have to be fighting these things and trying to stay super focused and productive, but instead you're freed up to really effortlessly spend time on the things that matter. We're going to go through your framework. We're going to talk about these tactics, but what's the end result of how the day feels, the week feels, life feels?

I want to share one quick thing that you will feel right away, which is bored. And I know that sounds odd. That doesn't sound very appealing. It's actually refreshing to feel that. I remember when I first adopted the distraction-free phone, which is what we call this idea of a smartphone that has all of the infinity pools removed from it. I remember just having these moments where I was like, oh,

oh, wow, there's nothing I have to check right now. I'm on a walk or I'm like waiting in line or even better. I like just sat down to do some work and I don't have that sense that I have to check something. That pull is gone. And at first it's sort of alarming. You're like, whoa, like that's weird. And then you're like, oh, wait a second. I can just pay attention to the things that I actually care about.

So that's sort of the immediate feeling. But Jake, maybe you could talk about sort of how it feels over time because you've had a truly distraction-free phone for 12 years now or something, right? Yeah, I mean, I backslide occasionally. I'll have something on there, take a trip and put email on there. I'll take it off because it's true that once you get used to this feeling of not having the pull,

It's like there's been a rope around your neck that's gone. It's a feeling of freedom. I think first it's stressful to think like, what am I missing? I'm old enough to remember what it was like before we had smartphones. And so I do have this pretty solid bedrock knowledge that you can be an effective person without having access to your email or Slack or the internet or whatever. Like that feeling at first is stressful and it's,

Then maybe the next feeling is boredom. Another manifestation of boredom is that time slows down. You actually get more lifetime because your time is going a little bit slower.

slower. When I'm in the mode, when I have everything on my phone, sometimes I have to turn it on for a trip, right? Like I said, for whatever reason, or try out some app. And then I realize, oh my God, this is an affinity pool. And at those times, I feel like I'm just constantly on. My brain has no rest and time just starts to blur by. It starts to go by faster. Our experience of time, it's not fixed. Sometimes it goes really fast and sometimes it slows down. I found that it slows down in a really good way when we create barriers.

Just so anyone listening who hasn't read the book yet knows, this isn't a book of distraction-free phone. There are a lot of tactics. So if someone's listening and thinks, wow, that one is not where I want to start. We're going to get through a lot of options. You don't have to get rid of every app on your phone. It's just one of the tactics. So maybe the best thing to do now is just walk people through what are the kind of high-level framework, how people can start to make time.

MakeTime is this framework that Jake and I created, and it's comprised of four different categories or four steps. The first is highlight. It's this idea that you should identify the single most important thing that you want to spend time on each day and then focus on it. The second step is laser. And this is really about setting up these barriers to distraction, changing the defaults around the

the technology that you use so that you can maintain laser-like focus on your highlight, that one thing you've identified. The third part is Energize. And this is sort of a recognition that the first two steps aren't really going to work if we don't take care of ourselves, our brains and our mental health and our physical health. And so the advice in Energize is all about simple ways to reset some of the

more physical defaults in our world so that we can have more energy, so that we can pay better attention. We can make really good use of that time in those moments. And then the fourth step is to reflect. We take an experimental approach. We both have worked in the technology industry for a long time and we work with a lot of startups and we're always reflecting

encouraging those teams to run experiments, to create tiny loops of feedback from their product to their customers and back. And we think that's really important in our own lives. And so the final step of make time is really to pay attention to what's working and what's not working and say, oh, you know, I tried removing everything from my phone, but it was too much or I actually felt that I wasn't able to get this important thing done or ended up just reinstalling everything.

That didn't work, so maybe I'm gonna try something else. Maybe I'm gonna pick a different tactic out of the book. Even if you're not trying a ton of different stuff, simply paying attention, treating your time and your life as a series of experiments is really important. And it's the thing that kind of completes the loop and just makes it all click together much more effectively. This framework comes from when we were running these design spreads, and we still are. So we've run hundreds of these now with companies. And we sort of saw that this notion of

having a highlight that we focused on each day. One most important thing that we brought our peak energy to that we were sure there was time and attention for that having a laser focus during that time, clearing away all distractions was super important.

And that the energy of the team was important that we needed to carefully monitor. When are people having snacks? When are we taking a stretch break? What are the kind of max hours we can work where we're still in the optimal mode and reflecting and looking back and finding ways to improve it? John and I started saying, hey, the stuff that we've learned here with these hundreds of startups, let's apply it for ourselves.

We found that there are some things that work for me that don't work for John, some things that work for John that don't work for me. So we don't think of it as this one size fits all recipe. It's just the framework is kind of undeniably true, we think. And the way you apply that framework is going to depend on what floats your boat. But no matter who you are, it sounds like everybody should start the day with a highlight.

I mean, that has certainly turned out to be the thing from this book that people have unanimously said, wow, that is transformative. Of course, we love to have people buy the book, read the book or listen to the book on Audible or whatever. But if you just start making a practice

of every day in the evening or in the morning, identifying a highlight for the next day. And we can talk more about how to do that so it works best. And then reflecting back at the end of the day and saying, was I able to make time for my highlight? Incredibly powerful shift

in the way you get things done at work, pay attention to what you care about in your life, unlock projects that you thought you couldn't get to, and slow down your life in a transformative way. Having one highlight doesn't mean you only do one thing a day, right?

So the one highlight is the single thing that you want to bring your best energy to, your best focus to. We tend to find that there's a couple different categories that those highlights fit into. So sometimes it's urgency. Sometimes it's a project that really needs to get done. It's important and you want to make it happen. Sometimes it's satisfaction. It's a project like Jake mentioned where maybe it's not going to happen otherwise and you know it's going to feel really good to have finally spent time on that thing. And sometimes it's just...

based in joy, right? Sometimes it's just something that is going to be fun for you. It's going to be restorative. It's going to help you spend time with yourself, with your family, with your friends. But, you know, we think of it as this 60 to 90 minute sort of block in the day. And then the rest of your day is everything else. Most days I have a focus block in the morning and

And then my meetings are after lunch. And then I have an admin block at the end of the day to get through email and things like that. It might not sound that earth shattering to say, I'm going to spend 60 to 90 minutes on something, but it's an amount of time that if you truly use it to focus on one thing actually is pretty huge. It's a level of focus that I think most people don't have in their day-to-day lives and that's

Once you get in the habit of doing that, a lot of the other things start to fall into place. You get this clarity about what really matters and what can take the back seat. It's not about doing only that one thing, but really making sure that you identify and then make time for that one most important thing each day.

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Two questions. So one, yesterday, I had these two things that were going to happen. So one, I needed to finish this part of the website I was building. That was like the urgency highlight. Totally. But then my wife and I, instead of going out to dinner as a family, I took our youngest daughter out on a date. My wife took our oldest daughter out on a date. We didn't plan on this, but we ended up meeting for dessert after. Were both of those the highlight? Can I have two? How do I think about two

two very different and competing things. The way that I think about it is the highlight is the thing that wouldn't otherwise get your time or wouldn't otherwise get your energy. And that varies day to day and week to week. Even as you go through different eras in your life, different seasons, you might find your highlight needs to be something different.

I can't answer your question without like being inside your head, but it sounds like the urgent thing during the day was like the thing that could have easily been like, oh, I'm doing all this other stuff and I can never get to that one thing. You know, on the other hand, maybe you've been meaning to take your kids out in this way for a while, but you had never quite got around to it. And so then maybe that's what you needed. Part of what's helpful about this daily cycle of reflecting and paying attention is

You can ask yourself, what do I need now? What do I need my highlight to be? And what's going to take care of itself? What's going to happen anyway, either because it's scheduled or because I have a routine for it or a habit for it. And that's a little bit outside of this idea of the really intentional focus with the highlight. And it can change throughout the day, right? Yeah, it can. It absolutely can. Well, I have a different one for yesterday. We've just finished the manuscript for our book and

And I'm really excited to send it to some of our test readers. That was gonna be my highlight. It's like, I cannot wait to do that. And then as it happened, because I've been in like a bit of crunch mode, getting this thing done, I was like, wait a second, I can hang out with my younger son and do some projects with him around the farm here. And that ended up being what I did during that time slot. When I pictured I was going to send out the manuscript. I realized in the moment, I was like, will it really kill me if I send those out tomorrow?

tomorrow instead of today. No, it won't. But this is a really special opportunity. I'm going to switch my highlight. This is where I want to put that peak energy. This is the one thing I want to make sure I give my strongest attention to. And it was worth it. It was absolutely worth it. It was a special opportunity, right? Looking back on the day, I was like, I can remember that.

So the notion that your highlight has to be set in stone once you pick it, sometimes you're going to change your mind during the day. Sometimes an opportunity is going to come up and that's going to be the right thing to do, or you're going to realize it. But as John says, it's just this practice of day in and day out thinking about what's most important. Where do I want to make sure that

If nothing else happens, I bring my peak energy to it. I bring my best focus to it, this thing that I'm going to enjoy. And that's for us really the power of the highlight. One other nice thing about the highlight is that even when you switch your highlight, when like Jake said, you were planning to do this thing, but you ended up doing something else. If you've created this habit of choosing a highlight and making time for it each day,

It's like you have some slack in your schedule, right? If you were booked back to back from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and a cool opportunity came up to hang out with your son or a friend or whatever, there's no slack, right? There's no room for that thing to happen. You have to go and cancel stuff. It's a bunch of extra work to email people and rearrange it or whatever. But when you've built your day around one block, it becomes unbearable.

a little easier to move things in or out of that block depending on what you need in that particular day. Now we talked earlier, the book's filled with tactics. So maybe let's pick a few, let's highlight a few highlight tactics and kind of flag some of the things people might want

to do to really make this work well? I'll start with a tactic that's actually not in the book. It's based on a tactic in the book. So I'll tell you the one it's based on and I'll tell you what I actually do. So there's a tactic in the book called design your day. The idea is to use your calendar, not as this list of things you have to do, or this list of things that somebody else dictated for you, but think of it as a canvas. Think of it as your planner for the day where you can sort of draw out, you can design out your day, how you want to spend time, what's important to you.

I realized a couple of years ago that most days I want the same things, I need the same things, and that I could create a calendar template. So this is a really important tactic for me. Basically, I have a template for my time for the week, and there are certain parts of the week that are for focus work.

certain parts of the week that are for meetings, parts of the week that are for admin work, sort of shallow work. And that basically repeats every week. And it's just this like scaffolding that I can build on. The extra cool thing is that there's this company called Reclaim that we invested in at Character, which is our VC firm. But initially I was just a user of the product.

It sort of manages that template for you. So you define, these are the habits that I have. These are the things that I need to do and approximately when I want to do them and how much time they're going to take. And then your calendar sort of gets organized

adjusted around those things. Reclaim sort of adjusts your calendar around, oh, if a meeting pops up here, we'll move lunch forward by 30 minutes to make room for that. That's been probably one of my most important and durable tactics is this idea of a calendar template to make sure that week in and week out, I'm sort of big picture spending time on the things that matter rather than just filling more and more of each subsequent day with meetings and email and things like that.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, because that's a very powerful tool, a very powerful way to take control of your time over not just a day, but you can extend it to

weeks and months, and they can become the template for how you work. And I've learned from John and apply that to my own calendar. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, a sticky note is an incredible tool for setting your highlight. So you start out the day, what's the thing that's going to be the most urgent or the most important to bring the most satisfaction or joy, whatever it might be to me, and you take your best guess at what that's going to be. You

You write it down on a sticky note and you stick it on a visible place on your phone. You stick it on your computer display. You stick it on your laptop or whatever, wherever you're going to be. You stick it somewhere where you can see it. Stick it in the kitchen. Stick it on the dashboard of your car. And then you just see that thing and you're like, right, that's the thing I want to make sure I bring my peak energy to. And then at the end of the day, you look back and you see if you did it. I think that that...

practice simply of identifying it and writing it down somewhere that I can see it is really powerful for me because I don't think I'm alone in this.

I think I can do more in a day than I can. I always think I'm going to do this and this and this and there's 10 things we're going to do today. And I vastly overestimate what I'll be able to get done. And as a result, if I don't have rails to protect myself, I'm constantly feeling like I did not measure up to the standards that I set because the to-do list was so long, the inbox was so long, and I thought I'd be able to get through all of these things. The highlight is a really powerful way to steer me back and just writing it down. It's okay, look, realistically, pal, it's

Your previous self from like 10,000 previous days says you're probably only going to get one thing done if you're lucky that's on your list and really do it well. So you do that. Maybe you get lucky today, you get three or four things done. But just seeing that one thing, it's a powerful thing to help me reset my own expectations.

I'll add a couple more highlight tactics that I think are helpful and that I use a lot. One is called batch the little stuff. You know, my day is made up of like 15 little things I have to do, not like one big thing that I need to do. And so whenever possible, I try to batch the little stuff together. So rather than like an email here, oh, jump back to that blog post I'm trying to write. Oh, another email came in. Okay, back to the blog post. Multitasking doesn't really work. We're not really capable of multitasking.

Instead of doing that, I will save all those little things, all those emails for a chunk of time. And I mentioned earlier this idea of an admin block. And the cool thing about it is that not only are you sort of

not feeling like you're pulled back and forth between things you're able to focus, but you actually get better at doing that thing, right? Like if you spend an hour going through your email, you're more efficient at email than if you tried to do one email every five minutes throughout the entire day. So that's, I think, an important one and just a practical one that I would encourage people to keep in mind. Batch the little stuff. How do you keep track of that little stuff?

Well, a lot of it has its own inbox. It lives in a place. I think a lot of productivity experts so-called would say, don't use your inbox as a to-do list.

I do. I basically, my inbox is my to-do list for all the little stuff. If there's a notification from something in Notion, we use Notion internally at Character, kind of our OS for the team. There's a notification, it'll be in my inbox. There's something I need to follow up on, it's in my inbox. I send myself a lot of email. I have an app, it's called Compose, and all it does is it opens the Compose sheet

on iOS so I can send myself an email without looking at my inbox. So then at the end of the day, when I get to that admin block, I open my inbox and I just kind of work through those things. Anything that isn't a little thing, that's a big thing, then it has to go on my calendar. A big thing needs to have some time dedicated to it or I need to decide that I'm not doing it right now.

And the last thing before we move on is what about days where you just don't get the highlight done? Can you do it the next day? Absolutely. Yeah. You can just try again the next day. I mean, certainly that happens to me all the time. Part of the notion with this too, is that you'll see each day as an experiment. These are the combination of tactics I tried today and

And if it didn't work today, maybe I picked the wrong highlight or maybe the system just broke down. But maybe this is like oversharing or it's about me, but personally I'll default to kicking myself if I don't do things right. This notion of it's one day at a time, let's look and reflect on what happened today and then figure out, okay, there was probably some thing that was working against me. There's all these powerful forces, these social pressures, all

all this software that's working against me all the time. What's a way I can battle it differently tomorrow? And maybe I'll try this highlight again. Or maybe like that highlight was just bigger than I thought it was and there's more to it. And so I'm going to do it again. Or maybe I'm going to do it again because I did it and it was great and I can go back to that well. Like any of those things are fine.

And this all plays into feedback loops, right? How quick are those feedback loops? Are you trying to get that feedback daily, weekly, monthly? We think daily is the right level of focus. We think that looking at this day by day is zoomed in enough that you can do something about it. Like Jake said, if you didn't

didn't get to your highlight or you didn't complete it and you want to try it again tomorrow or you want to try something different tomorrow, you can do something about it. It's actionable, but it's also zoomed out enough that you are, I don't know, able to think a little bit more holistically, sort of bigger picture about how you're spending your days, which is how you're spending your lives. We recommend that people, when they're just getting started, that they do it daily. We think that's kind of the sweet spot.

So we've got our highlight. We know what we want to focus on. We picked it the night before the morning of. I'm really excited to talk about how we get laser focus because I've seen it myself, right? I know that when I hit that moment, I can get done things in an hour that otherwise I'm like, wow, I've tried to work on this 10 times over multiple days. And then I just found that spot. What are some of the best ways to find that focus?

One way we think about this is the first half of finding that focus is identifying what you want to focus on. And then if you're trying to point a laser at that target, the next question is how do you get the disco ball of distraction out of the way so that the laser can hit the target? John and I, and you will, you too, Chris, built products for years and years. And we all know that there's effort always being put into making things simpler for us, taking steps away from

from things, whether that's one click buy on Amazon or making it so you can get a notification on your phone and you don't even have to like go and search to see if there's something on there, but it comes to you or AI results on search instead of having to dig through web pages, whatever it is, people are always trying to take a step away so you can get to the thing faster. That's a big business. There's a lot of economic incentive for people to take steps away and make it easier for us to do other things.

doing projects that we care about, there usually are extra steps. We usually have to spend some extra time to get there. So one of the first things we do is to try to build steps to get to the distractions, try to add some steps back in so that the disco ball is pushed out to the side. Similarly to how I take apps off of my phone that I think are going to distract me. You can do the same thing on your computer. There's an app called Freedom

That'll either block a specific list of websites or block the internet altogether for a period of time. So you can say, I want freedom for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, the whole day, whatever. And it'll shut down access to those things.

You can go so far as to put like a vacation timer on your router so that you just turn off the Wi-Fi. Then there are also things you can do to reset the expectations other people have of how fast you're going to respond to messages, email and the like. The reset expectations one, I don't want to say favorite because there are a lot of good things, but the idea of setting up an autoresponder that's like,

Like I've broken up my day or, you know, this is how I focus. I might not get back to you. If it's urgent, you can text me. You probably have a better template for that. That just was really interesting because I think the fear we all have is, well, if I don't check my email, but once a day, what if there's something important? And the answer, one way is to say, get over it. Nothing's that important. The other way is to create another avenue and

and set up a barrier if it really is that important. We have a friend that we work with, a business partner named Connor Swenson, who has taken MakeTime and he teaches it to teams. He works with big companies and helps them figure out how to implement this stuff inside their companies. And one of the things that he does with those teams is he walks them through...

what their minimum viable frequency is of checking email. And it's an interesting exercise and you can do it for yourself. You can think about my work in my life. How long could I go without checking email, without anything really bad happening? And you can define bad however you want. You're in a customer facing role, you're in sales or something like that. Maybe it's a little bit shorter than it is if you are a writer or a product designer or something like that. When you ask people that question, the answer is almost always more than an hour.

It's really hard to find somebody who would say, oh, if I don't check my email every hour, I'm screwed. Like I'm going to get fired from my job. It's going to be horrible. Even that alone, it's sort of an easy change that you can make is to just reduce the frequency of when you check your email. And this idea then of having sort of this cascade of, well,

I can't respond right now, but if you really need me to respond in the next four minutes, like contact me this other way, that just adds a little bit of extra friction and enables you to push that frequency of when you check something, maybe even longer, maybe to four hours, maybe do a whole day, something like that. This message is sponsored by Greenlight.

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Jake, you've gone the distraction-free phone route for a while. You've removed the apps. You've gotten rid of everything. There is an alternative for people who aren't ready for that, which is...

Well, you could keep the apps on your phone, but log out of them. So it's harder to get in or take them off your home screen or turn off the notifications. Or I am guessing what you do is you just use them on your computer or maybe you have another iPad that you use them on. But you're not saying don't do all these things. You're saying make it harder or make yourself have to do them somewhere else. Yeah, it's really nice if you can confine them to a spot. Sometimes I

I found that when I create separation from those things, when I stop getting this sort of constant feedback loop with Facebook, with Instagram, whatever, it started to feel a lot less necessary. And I realized it was more pleasant for me when I was in those times when I was away from it than when I was at my computer and could access it. So I just gave up altogether. For other things, it really is just about creating that bit of space. And that space can be device related.

It could be I can do this stuff in my office because that's where my sort of desktop computer sits or whatever. It can also be a temporal space. This is the time block when I use this stuff and this is the time when I don't. And again, that freedom app can be really helpful. You can have scheduled blocks. You can say I always want this

these things or everything to turn off at this time and turn back on again at this time. It's not about necessarily giving everything up. I don't think it's realistic for most of us. It's really just about changing the relationship and not feeling like we aren't going to get our money's worth out of our phone.

or we're going to miss out if we're not on top of things 100% of the time. When we wrote Make Time, I don't recall two-factor authentication being like a big deal, but now it is. Like you can set up two-factor auth on Twitter, on LinkedIn, you know, on things that are not mission critical applications. And that's actually another great way to add friction. That's something I started doing. So in addition to logging out or enabling something like Freedom, that's another really simple tactic that you can use. That's not in the book, but I use a ton and really helps.

And all these things are reversible. Now, one tactic that I use, and I can't tell if it's a stalling tactic or a good tactic, but I find personally that sensation of like, ah, like things aren't in order. I haven't checked my inbox. My desk is a mess. When I can get rid of those things, I feel more capable of just diving in. Now on the flip side, there's some advice, even a tactic in the book. Don't check all your email in the morning, use the morning for productive time.

Which I think for me would have me the entire time I'm trying to be productive being like, I still don't know if these things need to be resolved. Whereas if I wake up and sometime in the morning, I go through, make sure there's nothing urgent. And I'm like, now I'm going to focus. Am I kidding myself? Or is it different for everyone? One thing that we have learned is that it is different for everyone. The reality of it is that there's this discomfort that...

I think we kind of have to get used to because the prevailing culture and the prevailing expectation is that we're going to be on top of things. And so not being on top of things and by on top of things, I mean, I've gone through my email, I've responded to everything that I feel like I either have to, or sort of socially obligated to in some way. I've checked Slack, I've checked everything. I'm sort of up to speed. I've checked the news. I've

Like there is a feeling of I've checked everything and done all that work and now the decks are clear and now I can truly focus. And I won't lie to you, there is a feeling of psychological freedom that happens when you feel like everything is taken care of. The cost, however, of achieving that level of psychological freedom for most of us is nothing.

the cost of investing more deeply in these bigger things that are harder to make time for. And that cost comes both from the time that you spend catching up and clearing the decks, and also from the attention residue. I've been working in my email, I've been reading the news or whatever, and now I feel like I'm caught up, but that stuff is still with me. And this idea of attention residue, it comes from the study by Dr. Sophie Leroy from the University of Washington. I think we first heard about it from Cal Newport. And it's a fascinating idea. These

These things just stick with us and make it harder for us to be fully all in on another topic. I think it helps to start off with an activity we call Stack Rank Your Life. Make a list of every single project, work, project, life project that you currently have going on and also the ones that you'd like to do but do not have time for.

And then in whatever order, write that list out and then put them in order. Like what's the one, two, three, four. If you had a magic wand and had as much time as possible, where would you want to be spending it? And then just like circle the top one and figure out, well, how do I make time for that most important thing? If you look at that list and there is no deviation from the way your life actually is and the way your days actually are, then it doesn't matter. You don't have to get comfortable with the discomfort or any of that. Like you can just

keep doing things as they are. We sort of think like you want to apply more and more tactics if you feel like that list is more out of whack with what's actually happening. And if you feel like there is an important thing and I'm not getting to it, then you have to maybe get into this zone of getting comfortable with the discomfort because that feeling of

I can't start working yet because there's this pile of stuff and I need to clear the decks. You can get comfortable with that feeling of the decks being messy and get into the zone anyway. It's just one of those things. It's like that saying, like the more time you spend outside your comfort zone, the bigger your comfort zone gets, and you can get comfortable with the mess of the stuff that doesn't really matter so that you can focus on what's most important, but it'll take a few reps.

I think if you want to make a habit of clearing the decks work, then it's really important to constrain it along two dimensions. One is time and the other is channels. So like it has to truly be time bound because one of the big challenges with clearing the decks is that the amount of stuff that is on your deck will always increase, right? There will always be something else to look at or to take care of. And then constraining it along the line of channels is

allows you to say, okay, I'm not going to read the news in the morning. That's not actually going to change what I do during the day, but maybe email is important. Maybe Slack is important.

One of the habits that Reclaim schedules for me every morning is called pre-check. It's 30 minutes only. It's email only. And I do this because I have decided that in my job, my minimum viable frequency for email is about four hours. So I can't go from like the end of the day until the next day lunch. That would be too long for me to go if there's an email from a founder that we're sort of working with or trying to invest in. There's an email from a potential investor.

LP in our fund who's expecting us to follow up. I've accounted for that by having this pre-check block, but it's very tightly constrained. It's only 30 minutes and it's only email.

Yeah, another thing that's worked well for me, which was hard to get comfortable with is you make this list that you said, Jake, or you put down all the things that are important. And I feel like you have to be really ruthless about the projects that you haven't made time for about whether you actually want to do them. And so if you look at my macro to do list, which is just like project level.

I'm like, if something's been on there for three months and I haven't done it, sometimes the answer isn't make time for it. Sometimes the answer is like, let's just cut bait. This is not a project that I clearly prioritize. This is not an email that I actually want to respond to. And let's just not do it. That has become harder and harder to get comfortable with. But once you get comfortable with it, it's really freeing. A friend of ours that we both all worked with, Kevin Rose, he was really good a few times at like,

I got all these emails. I don't really want to respond to them. Command A, archive all. I'm not suggesting people go to that extreme all the time, but when there's a project that you have been pushing off and pushing off, if it's an option to not do it, that is a potentially viable option. Yeah, and maybe it's counterintuitive, but adopting some of these tactics of saying, I am going to identify a highlight each day. I am going to focus on one thing at a time. I am going to make a list of what's important to me.

That actually makes it easier to decide when something isn't going to happen because you've created a system for yourself. Like this is my system for what I spend time on. If there's something that clearly doesn't fit the system, it's uncomfortable for sure. But I find it easier to say, okay, it doesn't fit. It hasn't fit for three months. It hasn't fit for a year. It's not going to happen. Instead of, I think if you operate in sort of the conventional productivity paradigm,

paradigm of, well, if I just get organized enough, I just get efficient enough, I can do everything. You keep hope alive for that thing on your list that maybe shouldn't be there at all. Like you said, Chris. Lots of tactics to focus on things. What's required for this focus is energy. Let's talk about some ways that we can recharge ourselves. As much as it's about time and like dividing things up, it's really about having the energy to do the thing and dive into it and get into that zone that you described, Chris, where you're just like,

In an hour, I can do what normally might have taken me weeks to do because I was so locked in. So much of that is actually about physical energy. The brain is a part of the body. So whatever the tactics are, that is related to the work that you do or the time that you spend with your loved ones or the time that you spend doing this hobby or activity that you really care about.

The way you sleep, the way you eat, the way you caffeinate or don't, when you walk and take a break and reset your brain, all these things have a powerful effect on what you can actually do with your mind. Some of them we've done full deep dives on, but what are some of the highlights of tactics around energy that

people might not already know. We had the opportunity when we were at GV to work with Blue Bottle Coffee. And there were, as you might expect, some real coffee nerds. There was this one guy in particular, Ryan Brown, who had done a bunch of research himself on how the body actually processes caffeine. And maybe people listening know this already, but caffeine doesn't give you energy. It basically prevents you from getting tired. So there's like a

hormone that binds with the receptor in your brain and tells you it's time to be tired and caffeine blocks that binding. The thing that Jake actually turned me on to is not having coffee first thing in the morning. So your body learns that it needs that in order to wake up.

And so it sort of like blunts the effectiveness of it. You become more addicted to it and the caffeine is less effective. But if you can wait an hour or two hours or three hours to have your first cup of coffee, you'll wake up better. You'll actually have a better kind of energy first thing in the morning. And then if you want that additional boost from caffeine, if you want to experience that sort of quote unquote energy giving effective caffeine, you have it a few hours after you've been awake, it's way more effective. So that's one that I think is not

obvious. Certainly the default of how most people consume caffeine first thing in the morning is different. That was an interesting thing that we learned about that took me a long time to really implement in my own life, but I like it a lot. That has had a huge effect on my days. I have friends who are Swedish who can drink coffee like they just start the day, they're drinking black coffee, like water all day long, you know, right up till they go to bed, no problem. For me, it's not like that at all. I have to be mindful of it. And

spacing out and really picking those spots. I think of it like if you're playing Super Mario Kart and you've got like the mushroom turbo boost and you want to pick the right moment, like the straightaway to get that boost. If I burn up my mushroom, you know, and the turns in the beginning, it's a waste. It's a waste. So the caffeine timing for most of us, I think, is a really big deal and really worth experimenting on for your highlights. Yeah, my caffeine optimization is quite different because I don't really drink caffeine. I

I never really liked to taste a coffee. And one time I went to Starbucks, I was like, I don't know what to order. And so someone was like, you should get a nitro cold brew. And I was like, I don't know what that is. So ordered it. Best I can understand a very large nitro cold brew is like drinking two or three coffees, right? It's, it's way more than you need. I felt like I had taken a drug and I actually felt like I could focus, but

I've saved that and it's like a one or two time a year thing. I'm like, wow, like I can't find the focus. Let's use it almost like as a drug, not a thing every day. I'm not sure if I want to recommend that, but that is my experience.

Another tactic that might be a little new to people is called leave your headphones at home. AirPods have created this incredible default, this intersection of what's culturally acceptable, socially acceptable and technology. It's so easy. They're so light. They're so delightful to use. You leave the house, you're going for a walk, you're going to the store, you put AirPods in, which is great. It's wonderful. I do it all the time, but there's kind of this surprising and novel kind

kind of clarity and calm that comes if you just leave your headphones at home. You're going for a walk and you just don't have your headphones. I mean, it sounds so obvious like that it even has to be a tactic, but we have found that when the default is to always be listening to something, to always be consuming, to say, oh, well, I can't have downtime. I need to make good use of that time by learning something, whatever. If you can change that default and use that instead as an opportunity to recharge and to re-energize, it can be helpful.

Where do breaks and exercise and all of that fit into our ability to focus?

Well, they're really important. We can't be on all the time. And this is something that John and I noticed when we have run design sprints in the earliest days of doing it. We didn't have a schedule yet. We didn't yet know sort of what the structure of the day should be, how long we should go. So the notion with a design sprint is we're working with a team who's starting a big project. We want to help them go from sort of zero to a prototype that we're testing with customers by the end of the week.

So you've got a team of three, four, five, six, seven people. For us, it's a startup usually, but people have adopted this in all kinds of places. We have a lot to accomplish in a week to get there, to get from zero on this project to a prototype that's realistic that you can test with people. There's a lot to accomplish. At first, our instinct was, well, we need to work the longest days and cram in the most time. So quick breaks, long hours.

Over time, we learned we actually get more done if we work in these sort of focus blocks of 60 to 90 minutes. And we have long breaks in between those blocks. So up to 30 minutes where people can walk, have a snack, really do some of that reset that we're just about without the headphones and then come back and do another session. And so this notion that you have 60 to 90 minutes for a highlight, it's informed by that observation that we saw teams

reach their peak prevents when they were working in those blocks, taking a big break, doing another block, taking a big break. And so that would make a case for kind of stepping away from your desk, like going on a walk in the middle of the day, kind of just breaking up the day. What about more exercise? I feel like something that I'm sure is not unique to me is like, oh, I really want to work out, but I just got so much stuff to do. So maybe if I can like just catch up and

And it seems like the overwhelming theme is like, you'll never catch up. So stop trying to catch up. But how do you guys think about exercise in your own lives? A couple of ways. I think exercise is something that I really want to do is very important to me. But if I don't have a structure around it, it often slips to the end of the day or it doesn't happen. So in the book, we actually recommended kind of finding a way to exercise.

exercise on your own, sort of not depending on a trainer or a gym or some external setting in order to exercise, but rather to find a way to exercise on your own. And I've actually changed my tune on that, not because it's ineffective, but because I found that more often than not,

I just wasn't getting to it. It wasn't as important or didn't seem as urgent to me as other things. And so I've started working with a trainer for a few reasons, partially because they're very good at what they do and they help me with some specific challenges that I have, but also because now it's

scheduled, right? I am accountable to that person and that person has a full schedule of their own. If I cancel with them, it's not like I can just reschedule anytime I want. And so I know that it's important to keep that commitment. So that's something that I've done to help me make sure that I am making time to exercise. But I think there's another view of it for us, which is that

exercise is not just something that you should do or that you need to do to stay healthy, but that it's actually like a tool you can use to build energy. And I'm sure that anybody in your audience has experienced the feeling of being stuck and taking a break or going to take a walk to clear their head or just this sense that when you start moving and you get away from the desk, it just kind of gives you a new kind of energy. And so that's kind of another view of it is you can use exercise to

to actively give you energy to make it easier to then come back refreshed and really focus on the things that you want to make time for. Yeah, one thing that just made me realize when I go on a run, I sometimes have all kinds of ideas. Sometimes I'll pull out the notes app and I'm like trying to run, trying to write down an idea just so I don't miss it. Another time I was like, should I just bring a Sharpie and start writing on my arm? Or it's always dawned on me that that is probably because I'm not distracted, right? Like I'm running, I'm not

sitting there scrolling social media. I can't do that. I'm running. So I just have to be with my thoughts. And oh, when I'm with my thoughts, sometimes I come up with really interesting things. It's never dawned on me that you could just create that. It's like, oh, well, what if I just stopped using the social media ads? It sounds so obvious. But I was like, I just love that experience. And in my mind, I was like, I should just run more. Not there's another way to get to that state.

I think that we were all be better off if we can exercise in some way every day and the exercise, it can be a walk. For myself, I've found it's better if I don't do those Herculean exercise things. That's going to usually be a recipe for me hurting myself and then stopping the program or wearing myself out too much and not being able to focus. For most people you'll benefit from it more in the morning.

Then I benefit from that time that you just described, Chris, like that brain time, the sort of cognitive boost that I get afterwards. I get to enjoy that all day long. It's really powerful. Obviously, many reasons to exercise for our health and longevity and so forth. Just if you think about it as an equation for what can help you focus, what can help you do your work the best or bring the best attention to the people and the projects you care about, it's a great way to get more out of each day.

So I'm going to move us on to some reflecting and how you guys think about that process. We talked briefly about it, but maybe tactically, what do we do to reflect? I think at the most basic reflecting is just asking yourself, how did I feel today?

What did I spend time on? Was that what I wanted to spend time on? In the back of the book in MakeTime, we have a template for that. It's on our website too, so it's free. You don't have to buy the book to get it, but it's a simple template that you can use. The more important aspect of reflecting is

to then think about what you're going to do differently tomorrow. Because if you get in this habit of treating each day as an experiment, you can sort of look back and say, okay, how did it go? Did I make time for the things that I wanted to? And then if not, well, what am I going to do differently? Use the tactics in the book, or you can get inspired by other things that come to mind or that you read about or you hear about. But being somewhat deliberate about what you're going to do next is

That's the secret to propelling this daily experiment cycle. And over time, then getting to a point where you're not just reading a book and following some advice from us, you're making your own personalized system based on results from your own life, based on the things that have actually worked for you and that you are confident work for you.

that you enjoy doing that's going to both the mechanics of reflect, but also the bigger philosophy of why we think it's important. You can honestly just think about it as you're playing super Mario brothers and every day you either died or you got through the level. Maybe you didn't get through the level, but you went into a warp zone or something. You know, you changed your highlight, you went a different direction, but if you didn't make it through, if you look back and you're like, that did not go the way I wanted to.

If you think of it as, oh, I didn't measure up. I suck. Like you're not going to be having a good time, but hopefully people don't feel that way when they're playing super Mario brothers. You're like, man, that Goomba got me or the Koopa Troopa. I ran right into him. Next time I'm going to just jump a little bit sooner. I'm going to jump a little bit higher, whatever. Oh, we tried one thing. Did it work or not? And if it didn't work, what might I correct about it? Cause there's all these bad guys who are against me. And I feel like in the world of all of the distractions and

and all of the social expectations and all of the things that we pile on ourselves and expect ourselves to do, those are all bad guys that we have to avoid. And if we trip up for a day and if the bad guys get us, it's not this intrinsic problem with us. We're all going to have days like that. I have them all the time. Okay, the old system wasn't working for me. I need to adapt. Things are new. Or I'm trying to set up this new thing and it's not clicking yet. What am I going to change tomorrow? It can be as simple as that.

It sounds like even though you guys wrote the book and practice this daily, you still have days where you don't get stuff done that you want to. Oh my God. Constantly. It's a constant battle for me. And I'm constantly getting distracted by stuff all the time. I'm the worst. This is just like my, how do you take someone who's really easily distractible and

and very poor self-control and get anything done. MakeTime is that for me. Where would you send people to follow up on everything you're doing from character to MakeTime to anything else? I think it depends on what you're looking for. If you are specifically interested in getting started with some of these tactics, go to maketime.blog. There's a bunch of free resources. You can go as deep or stay as shallow as you want.

We've talked about the work that we do with founders. We invest in startups. We love working with founders when they're at the earliest stages of building their companies. And we do that through our VC firm, Character. Our website is character.vc. One thing that's really exciting in the character world is that twice a year, we run a program called Character Labs.

It's basically our version of a startup accelerator where we apply a lot of these lessons. We applied lessons from the hundreds of design sprints that we've run with companies. And we tailored this program to help people who are just getting started building something new. And so if you're at that stage, if you're in those early days,

You should also check out Character Labs. It's a cool opportunity to work with us as you're starting a new business. Yeah, as someone who has worked with you with portfolio companies and my own, I can fully endorse and recommend any

And anyone going through that design sprint process, yes, you can read the book and try to do it yourself, but going through it with someone who's done it is just one of the most interesting experiences you can have when you're building a company. Thank you for saying that. And it's also what's fun for us. And I think where we can have a big impact for founders is not just in leading them through the process, because like you said, they can read the book, they can do it, but we get to contribute ideas then, right?

If we were a normal investor and we talked to a founder once a month that were on the board or whatever, we throw out an idea like, hey, did you consider this? What if you did it that way? It's hard to really have an impact in that way. But when we're running a sprint with the core team of that startup, it creates an opportunity for us to bring our experience as designers and writers together.

and contribute those ideas directly. So we're literally making sketches, we're writing copy, we're working on mockups and prototypes for those founders. So that's one of the things that's really unique about working in this way with founders. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I'm such a big fan of all the hacks. And so this is really a treat to get to be on the show.

Such a great episode. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, please consider clicking that follow or subscribe button if you haven't already. It really helps us out. And there's no better way to support us than doing that or sharing the show with a friend, colleague or family member or even a random stranger is totally appreciated.

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